Machine learning based Breast Cancer screening: trends, challenges, and opportunities

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although breast cancer (BC) deaths have decreased over time, it remains the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women. With the technical advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and availability of healthcare data, many researchers have attempted to employ machine learning (ML) techniques to gain a better understanding of this disease. The present study was a systematic literature review (SLR) of the use of machine learning techniques in breast cancer screening (BCS) between 2011 and 2021. A total of 66 papers were selected and analysed to address nine criteria: year of publication, publication venue, paper type, BCS modality, empirical type, ML technique, performance, advantages and disadvantages, and dataset used. The results showed that mammography was the most frequently used BCS modality, and that classification was the most used ML objective. Moreover, of the six investigated ML techniques, convolutional neural network models scored the highest median accuracy with 96.67%, followed by adaptive boosting (88.9%).